RELIG301: Modern Religious Thought
Early Fall Start 2010 5 Credits Final grade: 3.9 Comparative Religion and Honors |
Ecstatic ReligionThis was my first class at the University of Washington and holds a lot of significance for me. It constitutes the first honors course I took as well as the first course which fulfilled credits for my comparative religion major. The class itself focused on religious ecstasy, including ecstatic rituals and possession. I was unprepared for the informal way it was taught, having been expecting something like high school but perhaps more difficult.
The class turned out to be one of the most influential courses of my undergraduate career. The final I wrote for this class, titled "The Catalyst of Religion" was my first eight-page paper. But more than that, it was the first time I had developed a real theory of my own based on what I had learned in a course. My proposal is that religious ecstasy is a catalyst by which religions can adapt to changing times and ideals. This coloured the way I studied religion in the coming years and ultimately I expanded this theory in greater detail as one of the last things I wrote at UW for a departmental honors thesis. |
Image: Banias. An ancient temple to the Greek G-d Pan in the Golan Heights of Israel.